Swanson will speak about and take questions on a variety of approaches to resisting, reducing and eliminating war, from counter-recruitment in schools, ending the draft, and conscientious objection, to lobbying, protesting, and dramatically disrupting the machinery of war. He will focus, however, on the process of educating people to recognize false justifications for war and to reject them.

Swanson argues that, while the prevention of a U.S. bombing campaign in Syria in 2013 and the upholding of a nuclear agreement with Iran in 2015 left much to be desired, they also provide grounds for encouragement, and were built on the public understanding of the lies about Iraq that had been promoted in 2002-2003. Swanson argues for a different understanding of current U.S. wars in Western Asia from that most often promoted on television. Frightening beheading videos, he suggests, were intended to draw the United States into war, and succeeded only because the U.S. public is not yet sufficiently resistant to such manipulation.